Sunday, November 30, 2014

THIS IS MY NEW FAVOURITE FUCKING MOVIE NOW. JUST SO YOU KNOW. I don't think I have laughed that hard in months. My face actually hurts.

(And the repetition of "Take my hand"! Oh, my GOD. I was totally unspoiled for that ((husband sitting next to me had already seen it twice)) and gasped and said out loud "OH FUCK YOU, MOVIE" and burst into tears. Awesome.)

Saturday, November 29, 2014

As a philosophical form, the fragment reflects the conditions of
modernity. In Friedrich Schlegel's view, the hyper-reflexive
expressive registers of irony and humor are particularly suited to
voice the modern mindset, and are, as such, intrinsically linked to the
fragment (such a view is also present in Novalis's writings,
though underemphasized in comparison with Friedrich Schlegel).
Novalis's turn to the fragment has a different philosophical
motivation. The fragment questions the idea that philosophical
system-building, be it of a deductive or a teleological kind, is fit to
capture the nature of reality. Like
Blüthenstaub—though the title was added when
Friedrich Schlegel was editing Novalis's text for
publication—the fragment emerges as an intellectual seed or
pollen that is meant to foster critical and independent reflection
rather than presenting a system of self-contained theorizing.

But all this happened a long time ago, nearly forty years ago; I do not know if it happens now, even in imaginary countries.

- Ursula K. Le Guin

(Altho was also thinking glumly that if Fitzgerald had had the misfortune to be born in the land of the rich and the home of the broke, without council housing and universal health care, we might never have had one word of her works. But that seems unworthy of the book, and her, and Novalis. The blue flower blooms where its seed falls....?)

Could they play and sing? Naturally they could. How else can the needy pass their time, except with music? Outside the lodgings, in the warm dusk which filled the Schaufelgasse, they began with little airs, little popular songs, then a trio. When the Mandelsloh came down the three flights of stairs, with her purse in her hand, and asked them, 'For whom do you play?' they replied, 'For Philosophy.'

Have been trying not to cry for the last half of this damn book -- which I knew would break my heart before I even picked it up, and I did so anyway. I was soldiering on, and right fucking there, crackle, CRUNCH. Sob.

This fucking book! It's like a song by Schubert, a phrase out of Mozart, a Prinzregententorte, Dürer's Young Hare. -- Du! Dein Mutter ist tot! -- Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp!

Interstellar may be the greatest silent movie ever made. It is a
stunningly gorgeous but annoyingly noisy, second-rate sci-fi movie with
Icarus-like aspirations of greatness, an intentionally-confusing film
with hints of climate change.

....First off, thank goodness this anti-inspirational movie isn’t
(clearly) about human-caused climate change, given that a main theme, as
expressed by its genius NASA scientist (played by Michael Caine)
appears to be:

“We are not meant to save the world. We are meant to leave it.”

And if you find it hard to believe that any modern eco-parable could have such a ludicrously defeatist theme, here’s the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LqzF5WauAw

Christopher Nolan himself admitted of that line, “Obviously, if that’s taken literally it would not be particularly positive.” Duh?

....As the Washington Post notes,
the movie ”never explains the source of the blight and the dust storms
that plague Earth’s remaining residents.” This Nolan-esque-ambiguity
appears to be intentional, based on this recent interview:

Reuters: In “Interstellar,” Earth faces a severe
environmental disaster brought on by the grounds drying up. Did you
want to address climate change?

Nolan: Not consciously. The honest answer is we live in the
same world, my brother and I. We work on the script, we live in the same
world as everyone else so we’re sort of affected by the same things,
worried about the same things, but we try not to be didactic in the
writing, we try not to give any particular message or sense of things.

Yes, why make a big-budget movie about an eco-collapse that looks a
lot like worst-case projections for global warming and then bother to
give viewers “any particular message or sense of things”?

Nolan responded to media and viewer complaints that there were “parts
where the music totally obliterates the dialogue” by explaining that was
intentional!
What about Michael Caine’s deathbed scene where it’s hard to tell if he
is in fact admitting the whole notion that his efforts were aimed at
saving humans on Earth was a lie? That was also meant to be intentionally confusing!

George Monbiot writes in the U.K. Guardian:
“Movies about abandoning Earth reflect the political defeatism of our
age: that adapting to climate breakdown is preferable to stopping it.”
Grist notes
in its take-down of the multiple absurdities of the movie, “I can’t
believe that intergalactic space travel was the best route to food
security.”
That’s especially true since — “plot” spoiler — it’s fair to say that
humans from the future are not going build a wormhole near Saturn for
us to flee Earth to another galaxy. In the U.K. Guardian piece “How Interstellar made Michael Caine think again about climate change,” the actor himself says:

“If Earth screws up, I think we all go. How many people can go through a black hole in a rocket? It’s not a bus.”

Based on the best Russian text, the translation preserves
Tolstoy's style in a highly accurate version in which precision of
meaning and emotional accuracy are conveyed in fluent and natural
English.

Rosamund Bartlett has won praise for her translations of
Chekhov and her biography of Tolstoy (Profile, 2010), her sensitivity to
the Russian language enhanced by meticulous research into specialist
terminology.

Bartlett's introduction and notes are informed by her
intimate knowledge of Tolstoy's life, the contexts in which he wrote,
and insight into his literary artistry and achievements.

Includes a note on the translation, select bibliography,
chronology of Tolstoy's life, list of characters and guide to
pronunciation.

For the most part, my late thirties are treating me exceedingly well. So of course my brain frequently turns to bemoaning all the time I wasted (and still do waste, alas) on perfectionism, because there's no better way to waste your time than to spend it beating yourself up for the time you already wasted. That's some high-level ouroboros-ing; don't try it at home. Seriously, don't.

But that's perfectionism for you. People who are not plagued by perfectionism think that it means doing everything perfectly, which it doesn't. That friend or relative you have who does everything perfectly is, I guarantee you, not a perfectionist. Perfectionism means that you abandon writing projects halfway through because you can't get that one scene (or even that one sentence) right on the first three tries; that you sit there night after night journaling about how random undignified human moments make you permanently unlovable; that you sabotage good relationships because a known outcome which is a disaster is still safer, in your mind, than an unknown outcome which could be amazing.

....Perfection, most of the time, means not doing anything. Which is why I'm working really hard on not wasting any more of my time on it. In my personal life, anyway: the irony is that in my computer-oriented-role at work I say, all the time, "Perfect is the enemy of good," and mean it. I can forgive software its limitations, but not myself mine. Maybe try to think of myself as charmingly buggy?

Saturday, November 22, 2014

I absolutely LOVED Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, and it also made me want to immediately go back and read all of Fitzgerald's work with all the new thoughts I now have about her in mind, which I think is really the best thing I can say to recommend it.

Friday, November 21, 2014

I highlighted (yes it is on the Paperwhite, I have no room for big hardbacks and can't hold them up anymore anyway) 'A short-lived Somerville magazine, Lysistrata, edited by Robert Graves's daughter Sally in 1934' --

-- and then squinted and thought 'No, that's not right....there was Jenny, Catherine and Lucia. Sally was the niece?' But I wasn't sure, so I checked. Yes, niece!

I WAS SORT OF HORRIFIED and then wondered how pathetic it was I knew the names of Graves's daughters offhand and nobody ever cares about this stuff but me anyway

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Maybe I think that if I (or
the person who is me, but whose body I am not currently occupying) write
this down, I will draw some logical conclusion. I will identify the
root cause of this current round of anxiety, and I will suddenly
recognise the street I live on, and be able to go to the supermarket
without being afraid of the fact that we are hurtling through space, and
stand in the bookshop and feel calm and easy. Maybe I think that
someone else might read this and go me too! your anxiety is not the most insane anxiety! and I can put my socks on and we can go for a walk in the park and no one will turn into an antelope.

Last week, at my regular counselling session, I told my psychologist I
was beginning to feel like A Girl Who Is Separate From But Also
Experiences Anxiety. It was wonderful. I was thinking about all the
things I could do with my life if I didn’t have anxiety, and I could
suddenly see each thing discretely. I could see that I might go on a
book tour and feel anxious, but that they were not the same thing. I
could imagine being a person who had anxiety, but wasn’t an anxious person. I felt newly purposeful, motivated, insightful but pragmatic.

(Written about games, but it works equally well for writing, movies, anything creative. Look, I liked zombies too, WAY BACK WHEN. But they are DONE.)

(also, I finally saw Shaun of the Dead and y'all are tripping balls, that was *horrible*)

The zombie apocalypse is the weakest apocalypse. The
threat of apocalypse is an actual non-fictional thing. There’s climate
change, peak oil, peak water, near-earth objects, toxin accumulation,
supercalderas, plus there are still enough nukes lying around to end
civilisation several times over. On a less global scale, there’s
economic collapse, conquest, genocide, colonialism, poverty,
homelessness. Postapocalyptic fiction has potential to get us to think
about this: but the zombie apocalypse has become a formulaic, often
escapist fantasy that avoids the genuinely uncomfortable in favour of
squick and headshots. Triffids would be better at this point.

Zombies are the othered enemy. We have a culture
that cheerfully divides human beings into those whose deaths must be
treated as deeply, individually serious, and those whose deaths can be
written off as regrettable but basically inconsequential or necessary.
Zombies serve that motive. In particular, the central threat of modern
zombies is: a faceless, innumerable mass of mindless, violent,
contagious people bent on tearing society apart. That is… just the
tiniest itty bit problematic.

Zombies are not actually all that scary if
you de-stress the Mindless Inhuman Horde element. Largely this is
because we know how they work by this point. (I suspect this has a lot
to do with their popularity: they’re homeopathic horror. ‘Oh no, the
disgusting mortality of the human body!’ ‘Can we fix it with violence?’
‘Yes. Yes, we can.’) There are a number of scary things buried in there,
but most of them have been bled dry by overuse. Boring territory is safe
territory, and vice versa.

On top of all my OTHER personal issues re avoidance, procrastination, anxiety, perfectionism, blah, blahblah sing along you know the words, I got two nasty shocks during the actual writing month. One was the loss of the Dems in the Senate -- I knew it was coming for days, it wasn't a surprise, but it was still really fucking depressing. For one thing I think there's now a really good chance of a Republican president in 2016, and God help us all then, especially since this household consists of TWO AGING DISABLED CHRONICALLY ILL MOSTLY-UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE, with cats. (My husband can get programming work, some years, but it's all contract stuff, which means no security, no benefits, and much lower pay.) Seeing as how last time he was unemployed it lasted over a year, and the Republicans want to set fire to the comfy safety hammock of UI, food stamps, utilities grants, and other programs that clearly do nothing but enable leeches, I can't help but feel our future looks particularly bleak. Fuck the whole "I'll never get to do all the stuff I intended to do in my twenties!" gig, now it's more like "How do we keep our apartment and the lights on and the cats fed and...."

The other, bigger, thing was that when I drowned my laptop in coffee, like Prospero but with half-and-half, I lost all my notes, drafts and every writing-related thing. I didn't panic about it at first because I thought I'd had most of it backed up on a flash drive (no, it was not on Dropbox, and I don't have an external HD) but that turned out to be corrupted (the virtual Mob got to it? I don't know). I know some people who can chirpily exclaim "This is good! I can toss aside all those preconceived notions and start FRESH!" I....am not one of them, to put it mildly. This loss was so bad I haven't even really written about it anywhere. That's how you know things are really bad with me, I shut up.

I dunno, maybe I'll start again next month, or in January. November just does not seem to work out for me. We'll see. Trying to ensure basic survival (T's job ends soon) sort of comes first.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

after going to bed at 10 (and waking up around 8). What the shit, do I have Stealth CFS or something? And was barely awake enough to cook a really simple dinner. And now I'll probably go back to bed at 10 again, because now I'm getting a headache. WTF is this....

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

By mid-2012 nineteen states had approved new legislation restricting voting, including seven of the nine battleground states in the general election. The total number of electoral votes potentially affected, 212, was more than three-quarters of the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency.

....For years political operatives have understood that Democrats win by addition and Republicans by subtraction. Now the GOP....was poised to subtract roughly five million votes from an American election.

Friday, November 14, 2014

so I could write and listen to music and have my ebooks and yes post silly fun stuff to Tumblr again and not feel utterly cut off from them and the rest of the world (for various reasons, I don't have a phone)

I don't even fucking know what to say. I want to say something like 'I'll never complain about anything again' except sadly, that would not be true (heh) and that's not how my friends want me to feel anyway, but goddamn if that doesn't feel utterly true right now. I am just. WOW.

Monday, November 10, 2014

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.

(A man is freed after forty-seven years in the Bastille.) This city, so beautifully peopled with living beings, it is for him a necropolis; no one knows him; he knows no one; he weeps and longs for his cachot.

Crushed by grief, he goes to find the Minister whose generous compassion has made him a present of that liberty which so weighs upon him. He bows and says: Let me be taken back to the prison from which you have drawn me. Who can survive his parents, his friends, an entire generation? Who can learn the universal death of his own people without longing for the tomb? All these deaths which, for other men, arrive separately and little by little, have struck me at once. Separated from society, I lived with myself. Here I can live with neither myself nor new men for whom my despair is but a dream. It is not death which is terrible, it is to die the last of all.

....He scarcely wants to communicate with that new race whom he has not seen born; in the middle of town he makes himself a retreat no less solitary than the cachot which he had lived in half a century; and the grief of encountering no one who can say to him, we saw each other of old, speeds him to his grave.

I think the thing depressing me most right now isn't actually the lost programs (Calibre, iTunes, Spotify are probably the ones I use most frequently) or files (about four thousand ebooks, in various formats, probably 10MB of music, maybe six years' worth of pictures) but not being able to listen to music, really. Music is my boyfriend really my strongest antidepressant, and without it I just....wilt.

Because it's not just the lost music files or iTunes or the Spotify and Last.fm desktop clients (yes I am a dinosaur) and not being able to stream from YouTube and 8tracks. I quit buying CDs really I don't know how long ago, in a vain attempt to save storage space because hey, it's all online. When I was really broke I ripped a goodly number of CDs and then sold them (yeah that worked out well). "Well! I do have CDs," I thought, and then realized....I don't even have a CD player anymore. Not a standalone, this-works-without-anything-ripped-off/dreamed-up-by-Steve-Jobs-or-Bill-Gates CD player. So without a reliable laptop now there's just....silence, mostly.

(And I've always thought of myself as a speed bump on the information highway. If web 2.0 has me in its clutches this bad, IT HAS DEVOURED US ALL.)

with increasing volume and scariness. Also occasionally it just goes dark (not BSOD; just, it's off) for no reason. No, we can't afford to fix that one, either.

I don't even fucking know. I'LL GET A LOT OF READING DONE I GUESS (yeah yeah this is a 'good excuse' for not doing Nano, but I'm one of those people who needs a keyboard to write, even tho the IBM Selectric II destroyed my hands at an early age; pen and paper is just way too fucking slow) (and if I could get showered dressed and out to the library every day, you know, that would mean I wasn't fucking depressed all the time)

Sunday, November 9, 2014

I have been reading Mr. Kafka and I feel his problem of getting grace.
But I see it doesn’t have to be that way for the Catholic who can go to
Communion every day. The Msgr. today said it was the business of reason,
not emotion—the love of God. The emotion would be a help. I realized
last time that it would be a selfish one. Oh dear God, the reason is
very empty. I suppose mine is also lazy. But I want to get near You. Yet
it seems almost a sin to suggest such a thing even. Perhaps Communion
doesn’t give the nearness I mean. The nearness I mean comes after death
perhaps. It is what we are struggling for and if I found it either I
would be dead or I would have seen it for a second and life would be
intolerable.

People heard it loud and clear when the baby boomers crossed over to
midlife – you couldn’t avoid it. Radio talk show hosts probed into the
transition, newspapers described boomer women coping with crow’s feet
and men reclaiming their vitality in tribal drum circles. For the
generation born after – in the ‘60s and ‘70s, raised by television like
no previous generation and with the divorce rate skyrocketing during
their childhood years — there is no media watch broadcasting their new
trajectory. Few have even noticed that this small, notoriously
rebellious clan – those born roughly between 1965 and 1980, which means
about 46 million Xers versus 80 million boomers — has entered middle
age. It’s a transition that, until now, has been captured, mulled over
and ridiculed for each generation for more than a half-century. But not
this time.

The problem is, with adulthoods repeatedly shipwrecked
by economic disasters, Xers might have neglected to track the crossing
over. Susan Gregory Thomas, author of the resonant memoir ”In Spite of
Everything,” says that many Xers “are always living in a state of
triage, always in a survivalist mode. We’re not thinking long-term.”

(And yet the article ends with: "It's time to rise up and get angry!" It's hard to make your angry voiec heard when you've been going to food banks after being unemployed for two years. Or even to get angry, because, as the article starts, you're just trying to survive.)

(Also: see all those damn articles about how tragic it is that thirty-one-year olds now have to move back home, OHNOES) (some of us have no homes to move back to, by now)

....in addition to the emphasis on individual catharsis, the culture of
unchecked rage that sometimes wracks us is also an artefact of
patriarchy itself and its lust for competitive, often violent contest.
Much ink has been spilled on the masculinism that infects activist
discourse, leading to delightfully snarky epithets like “Manarchism,”
but we ignore the fact that white cis men are not the only people
perpetuating this; it’s a culture, it does not dwell only in those with a
perceived “essence.” We often unthinkingly accept and venerate the
modalities and methods that patriarchy most favours; rage fuelled,
unempathetic, us-versus-them politics is an ideal fit with the political
hellscape of modern, neo-liberal patriarchy. It is a world that prizes
the atomised particular over the powerful but compromising collective.

Your rage fuels the profits of every major website on the internet;
be it Facebook, Twitter, Fox Nation, the New York Times’ comment
sections, blog comments, Reddit, Tumblr, or Slashdot, your rage gets
others angry, committing them to call-and-response threads hundreds of
comments deep, which keeps them coming back to threads obsessively,
which generates pageviews, ad impressions, and more revenue for the
interested parties.

....Rage seduces us all, no matter what our
background, and its siren song will always be in the language that most
appeals to us as individuals, regardless of our politics.

Friday, November 7, 2014

( -- Why am I reading about the French Revolution? Fuck, I have no idea. My brain is driving, I am just along on its ride. I think I thought Scarlet Pimpernel would be fun, and it just sort of....ballooned from there. I think.)

....oh hey, The Gods Are Athirst got lots of raves, the guy won the Nobel, Orwell liked him (Orwell is so often my touchstone), he was on the side of the angels in l'affaire Dreyfus, why not. Plus his work is free on Gutenberg! The best price of all.

Évariste
Gamelin, painter, pupil of David, member
of the Section du
Pont-Neuf, formerly Section Henri IV, had betaken himself at an early
hour in the morning to the old church of the Barnabites, which for
three
years, since 21st May 1790, had served as meeting-place for the General
Assembly of the Section. The church stood in a narrow, gloomy square,
not far from the gates of the Palais de Justice. On the
façade, which
consisted of two of the Classical orders superimposed and was decorated
with inverted brackets and flaming urns, blackened by the weather and
disfigured by the hand of man, the religious emblems had been battered
to pieces, while above the doorway had been inscribed in black letters
the Republican catchword of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death."*

I may have gotten in actual flamewars about how nasty people (i.e. men) were about Constance Garnett and her translations back in the day on Badreads, but oh, my God, Mrs Wilfrid Jackson, whoever you are, I am sorry, just, NO. Not right now. Not with a dead laptop and Republican Senate and when the only foods that don't make me run immediately to the bathroom are oatmeal and apples.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

The World is a Room and Other Stories, Yehuda AmichaiI Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth, Margaret AtwoodI'm Starved for You, Margaret AtwoodAt Last, Edward St. AubynAll the Truth is Out: The Week Politics went Tabloid, Matt BaiBathing the Lion, Jonathan Carroll What It Takes: The Way to the White House, Richard Ben Cramer Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, Kathryn HarrisonThe Woman Who Borrowed Memories, Tove JanssonWolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (bought a hard copy of this a while back and have just given up wrangling it with RSI-damaged wrists and elbows) The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca SolnitA Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca SolnitSavage Dreams: A Journey, Rebecca Solnit The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (New York Review Books Classics), A.J.A. Symons

AND THEN I WENT TO GET A CUP OF COFFEE AND SPILLED IT ALL OVER MY LAPTOP AND BROKE IT RIGHT AFTER MY BIRTHDAY BECAUSE MY LIFE IS JUST THAT AWESOME. YAY.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

To appeal to her, was made
hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had been
laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which she had
been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had been
ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any softer
feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who sent her
there.

Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly worn,
it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her dark hair
looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her bosom, was a
loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus
accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such a character, and
with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her
girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand, Madame Defarge
took her way along the streets.

Monday, November 3, 2014

Everyone compares A Tale of Two Cities to Les Miserables (....why?) but of course Hugo's actual novel of the Revolution is Ninety-Three. I have the Bantam (abridged?) paperback of that around here, SOMEWHERE. SIGH. I can't read French (WOE; because I went to St. John's, where we learned to dispute about how translation is impossible instead) so I am trying to figure out which translation I want.

In the latter part of May, 1793, one of the Paris battalions sent into Brittany by Santerre, searched the much dreaded forest of La Saudraie, in Astille. There were only about three hundred men in the reconnoitring party, for the battalion had been well-nigh annihilated in the fierce conflicts in which it had engaged.It was after the battles of Argonne, Jemmapes, and Valmy, and of the First Paris Regiment, which consisted originally of six hundred volunteers, only twenty-seven men remained, of the Second Regiment only thirty-three, of the Third only fifty-seven. It was unquestionably a time of epic strife.
(I can't tell who translated this, I think it's the "Jefferson version" of the complete works.)

In the last days of May, 1793, one of the Paris regiments thrown into Brittany by Santerre reconnoitred the dreaded wood of La Saudraie in Astille. There were not more than three hundred men, for the battalion had been well-nigh swept off by this fierce war. It was the period when, after Argonne, Jemmapes, and Valmy, of the first regiment of Paris, which had numbered six hundred volunteers, there remained twenty-seven men; of the second, thirty-three and of the third, fifty-seven. It was a time of epic conflict.
(Frank Lee Benedict version. This is the ONLY version available in English on the Kindle. I bought it grudgingly, because it was $2.)

During the last of May, 1793, one of the Parisian battalions led into Brittany by Santerre was scouring the terrible woods of La Saudraie in Astille. The battalion had only three hundred men left, for it had been decimated by the cruel war. It was at the time when after Argonne, Jemmapes, and Valmly, there remained of the first battalion of Paris, originally numbering six hundred volunteers, twenty-seven men; of the second battalion, thirty-three men; and of the third, fifty-seven. It was a time of epic conflicts.
(I think this is Helen Dole's version. At least she doesn't go for "well-nigh.")

A number of people praised James Hogarth's translation, but ALL you can find excerpted online from him is Toilers of the Sea, and while I'm sure some Amazon seller is offering his edition, their site is so hopelessly jumbled, and I recently had such a poor experience with a third-party seller, I went to Powell's instead. I love Powell's but every time I search for something there, I turn up snake eyes. No exception this time. I don't know if it's my rotten luck or their rotten search engine or both. Elliott Bay had Les Mis and not much else. Ditto the local downtown Ignoble Barn. ("You want Toilers of the Sea? No? You sure? You sure you're sure?") I went for abebooks.com because at least they let me see the damn cover WHILE I was ordering it. "Ninety-three, by Victor Hugo; Translator-James Hogarth; Published by Kennedy & Boyd (2008-09-29); ISBN 10: 190499993X / ISBN 13: 9781904999935; seller, ExtremelyReliable (Richmond, TX, U.S.A.)." That sounds right. Fine, ExtremelyReliable in TX, U.S.A., you have my business, despite your reallyterrible DBA name.

RICHARD MAXWELL: //goes on and on at great length about how Dickens complained at having to 'condense' this novel for weekly installments instead of monthly

IRONY: //throws herself on a chaise lounge, sobs, eats bonbons

MAXWELL: Also, this novel is not historically accurate!

MOI: you don't sayMAXWELL: 'This admirable but problematic study (The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom) offers a rich trove of Bastille-lore; however, having discovered that certain motifs and images have a life of their own, the authors seem occasionally close to supposing that there was no Bastille, only a closed set of literary conventions and political polemics about it.'

MOI: damn you Derrida

DICKENS: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.'

DICKENS: 'It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set aside to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But, that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently....'

HARDY: Hey, that's MY thing --

MOI: 'Bespattered'?

DICKENS: //defensively It was the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine!

RICHARD MAXWELL: Now, if you read Carlyle's French Revolution --

MOI: NO.

DICKENS: 'A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted
to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn
consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those
darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every
one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the
hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a
secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death
itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear
book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I
look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary
lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other
things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a
spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was
appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the
light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore.
My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul,
is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret
that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to
my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I
pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are,
in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?'

“We save ourselves,” Ms. Witherspoon said. “Every woman knows it. Every
man knows it. You look up. Nobody’s coming to the rescue. It’s a
universal story. But it’s revolutionary in the way that a woman is
allowed to tell it.”

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Fiction is in red. (Have also decided at this late date to add years of publication, a la Captive Reader, who makes me feel like an illiterate slug.)163. Lost for Words, Edward St Aubyn (2014) (not as good as On the Edge)164. The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy (1905)165. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (1895)166. All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, Matt Bai (2014) (fairly disappointing) (also why the hell is Richard Ben Cramer so worshipped by this guy? And other writers? I tried reading What It Takes and the style was UNBEARABLE, it was like Early-Middle Norman Mailer but without the boorish 'charm')167. The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House, Chuck Todd (2014) (MY GOD, that was horribly written. Really terrible, amazingly so)168. Small Victories, Anne Lamott (2014) (more substantive than her last two or three books, but that's because it's mostly reprints)169. The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, Jonathan Alter (2013)170. Revival, Stephen King (2014) (pretty good! rather literary)171. Film After Film: Or, What Became of Twenty-first Century Cinema?, J. Hoberman (2012) (worthwhile, in the end, altho someone needs to rip the word "indexicality" right out of his vocabulary) 172. Penelope Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee (2013) (beautiful, stunning, graceful) 173. Foxglove Summer, Ben Aaronovitch (2014) (fairly limp -- looking forward to SOME plot resolution in the next one....?) 174. Flesh and Blood, Patricia Cornwell (2014)175. Moonlight Mile, Dennis Lehane (2010)176. The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald (1995) (superb. Sheer fucking genius. Not one word wasted)177. A Day of Fire: A Novel of Pompeii, Stephanie Dray, Ben Kane, E Knight, Sophie Perinot, Kate Quinn, Vicky Alvear Shecter, and Michelle Moran (2014)

Saturday, November 1, 2014

....from Ecstasy to Cure for Pain. It was originally named after the Lou Reed song (I saw him perform it live at Bumbershoot in 2001, and got the idea not long after that) but as many, many people pointed out, readers will apparently think it's a book about X, not junkies. And I don't think a single person in the book takes X, which is an entirely different scene. Was so pleased at "new" title (have loved that Morphine song ever since about 1994) think I shall knock off for the day, like James Joyce. The NaNo site informs me that at this rate, I shall finish by June 18th, 2060. I find this a fine goal.

mothers and men

Hither rushed all the throng, streaming to the banks; mothers and men and bodies of high-souled heroes, their life now done, boys and unwedded girls, and sons placed on the pyre before their fathers’ eyes; thick as the leaves of the forest that at autumn’s first frost drop and fall, and thick as the birds that from the seething deep flock shoreward, when the chill of the year drives them overseas and sends them into sunny lands.